7 Craziest F1 Engines

The good, the bad, and the completely noncompetitive.

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Formula One is usually considered the pinnacle of motor racing, where extreme driving dynamics are paired with unparalleled technological advances. In a world of extremes, everything is exaggerated. That's why the oddities and failures along the way are so interesting. Take a look back as we examine some of the craziest F1 engines of all time. Some were abysmal failures, some stunning successes, and some were just plain odd.

British Racing Motors didn't learn their lesson with the phenomenally powerful but temperamental V-16. The idea behind the H-16 was brilliant: Use the
existing architecture of another engine, graft it together to form two horizontally-opposed eight cylinder units stacked on top of each other and geared
together through their crankshafts. Compact and with a low center of gravity, the H-16 was cursed with too much weight and far too little power or
reliability.

There are crazy engines that are wildly successful—the M12 and the turbo Renaults spring to mind—and then there are the massive, embarrassing failures. The
Life W-12 falls into the latter category. We're all familiar with the W-engine layout now that VW Group's been stuffing them into everything from the
Passat to the Veyron, but the quasi-W layout that Life used was a little different. It had three banks of four cylinders sharing a crank, not the siamesed
VR6 engines like the VW type. But more importantly, it flat-out sucked. With about half the power of competing engines, and situated in an uncompetitive
chassis, the poor thing failed to qualify most of the time. It was a stunning failure for the otherwise talented engineer who designed it, Franco Rocchi.
However novel the layout, the Life W-12 has become the punchline to a lot of F1 jokes.

Who got the last laugh? At first, it wasn't Renault. The early turbocharged V-6 engines were disastrously unreliable, and the yellow-liveried F1 cars spent
a lot of time stationary and clouded in smoke. The competitors stopped laughing when the "Yellow Teapots" stopped smoking. The diminutive V-6 eventually
made 1200 hp or so during the most powerful era of F1. Of course, no one had a dynamometer that could handle that sort of power, so the output numbers are
a little theoretical. Sadly, it wasn't until after Renault left F1 racing for financial reasons that the EF-Type engine had its greatest successes on the
track.

Honda had big brass injectors to race in F1. At that point, Honda was essentially a motorcycle company that had just expanded into selling tiny
quasi-cars like the S500. On top of that, Soichiro Honda was on an air-cooled bender, and ordered his incredulous engineering staff to build an air-cooled
F1 engine. No one really knows how good the resulting RA302 actually was. That's because John Surtees flat-out wouldn't drive it. He thought it was a
deathtrap, and unfortunately he was right. Jo Schlesser crashed in its first race, and the unfortunate combination of a magnesium frame and a full tank of
fuel meant there was no escape for poor Schlesser. Honda pulled out of F1 right after that. It's a shame, because while the air-cooled motor would become a
technological dead-end with emissions controls and become the first real failure of Soichiro's vision, it was a damn cool-looking car.

Lamborghini is famous for many things, one of which is the company's reluctance to go racing. Sadly, the 3512 V-12 engine of the late 1980s was an
ill-fated attempt to change that. Its 80-degree bank angle made it lower than most V-12s but not as wide as many V-8s, benefits that were difficult to test
when the car was too slow and unreliable to be in the running. Parent Chrysler axed the motor after a few seasons.

Here's one you probably haven't heard of. Porsche, dominator of both sportscar racing and Formula 2 back in the day, was conspicuously absent from F1
racing. When F1 decided to adopt the smaller engine format of F2, Porsche said, "why not?" While their contemporary F2 car did F1 duty at first, the 804
was developed with an incredible air-cooled 1.5-liter flat-8. Sadly, the chassis wasn't up to the standard of the engine, and realizing their investment
would only pay dividends on the track with an even larger pile of money, Porsche called it quits. Thankfully, an enlarged version of the engine became
quite successful in the more well-known 904.

BMW got a lot of mileage out of their little M10 four-cylinder, introduced in 1961. 25 years later, it's manic spawn, the M12, was laying sideways in the
back of a slinky Brabham being force-fed air and fuel to the tune of 1,300 hp — the an extreme output in an era of extreme engines. Sadly, with that kind
of boost, and within the tight confines of the Brabham's bodywork, the M12 was not very reliable. In taking the sheer output crown, however, it has earned
its place in history.